Russia condemns Adra massacre, calls on world community to react

Russia’s Foreign Ministry has condemned massacre in the town of Adra, 20 kilometers north of Damascus. Survivors say jihadist rebel groups executed dozens of civilians, including children, beheading them or burning them alive.

“Moscow is convinced that such acts have to be decisively
condemned and the international community should actively
confront the perpetrators and financers of those acts,”
Aleksandr Lukashevich, spokesman for the Russian Foreign
Ministry, said in a statement.

While the Syrian army continues its broad push to get the
insurgents out of Adra, RT Arabic has gathered eyewitness
accounts of what happened in the town last week, when it was
captured by Islamist rebels of the Al-Nusra front and the Army of
Islam.

Those who managed to flee the violence in Adra and reach Damascus
say they saw the militants slaughtering Alawites, Druze,
Christians and Shiites indiscriminately. Fearing their interviews
might do harm to their relatives still in the occupied town, the
fugitive survivors asked not to reveal their identities.

One of them told RT that all of the officials in the town were
killed “no matter what religious groups they belonged
to.”

"Among them were people who did not support any of the
warring parties – neither the opposition nor the government.
Nevertheless, they have been abused – they were terrorized and
used as human shields,” the witness said.

There’s no reliable way at the moment to communicate with the
people trapped inside Adra, but RT Arabic’s Abutaleb Albohaya,
reporting from Damascus, cites the country’s officials as saying
that “the atrocities against the civilian population are
continuing.”

“What is happening in Adra is unthinkable,” one of the
Adra escapees told RT. “Children are being slaughtered and
thrown out of the windows. But no one is doing anything. The
crisis in Syria continues in an environment where there is no
international law, including those relating to the paramilitary
operations.”

Human Rights Watch has been evaluating the reports coming out of
Adra.

“I am afraid we cannot comment at this stage, as our research
is still ongoing and it has been very difficult to get accurate
information about what is happening in Adra and who is
responsible for the abuses,” Lama Fakih, the watchdog’s
Syria and Lebanon Researcher told RT in an e-mail.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has
complained that Adra is inaccessible to its experts.

"We don't have access to this area and can neither confirm
nor deny any information circulating," the ICRC said in a
reply to RT’s request for comment.

The government in Damascus, meanwhile, wants to draw the UN’s
attention to events in Adra. The Syrian Foreign Ministry sent a
letter of complaint to the United Nations on Monday, saying that
more than 100 people were massacred by the al-Nusra Front and the
Islam Brigade in a suburb of the capital.

“Adra has seen some horrific crimes,” Nizar Skif,
chairman of the Union of Lawyers in Syria, told RT. Among the
atrocities, the lawyer said were reports of “sadism,” of people
being “thrown into the furnaces” and “houses burned with people
inside.”

Speaking in Brussels on Monday, Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergey
Lavrov, described the Adra massacre as outrageous. He said it was
not the only evidence of brutality on the part of some of the
rebel groups, which constitute the so-called Islamic Front,
created as an alternative to the Free Syrian Army, which has
positioned itself as a secular force, committed to keeping Syria
a multi-religious society.

“The Islamic Front has proclaimed quite radical goals,
although our western partners have been trying to establish ties
with them and describe the front as an “acceptable power”, which
possesses influence “on the ground,” Lavrov said at a press
conference. “However, there’s some evidence which we consider
reliable and which shows that when the front was being created, a
possibility of Al-Nusra joining in was discussed. That did not
happen only to save the front’s reputation, as Al-Nusra has been
on terrorist organizations’ lists in the US and Europe.”

Lavrov expressed his concern over the possibility that the
Islamic Front could be ideologically close to Al-Nusra, now that
the US mediators of the Geneva-2 peace talks on Syria, set for
January 22, have been meeting with the front’s representatives,
trying to “somehow get them “under the umbrella” of the Free
Syrian Army”.

With new groups within the Syrian opposition having lately
“sprung up like mushrooms” according to Lavrov, Russia
has been particularly concerned with who exactly is going to
negotiate peace with the Syrian government at the so-called
Geneva-2 peace conference.